Graduate Jobs in Advertising and PR

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The Advertising Industry - Overview

Graduate Jobs in Advertising

Advertising is pretty easy to grasp in some ways as we’ve all grown-up consuming it. You get advertising on TV, in press, on posters, online, through your door, projected onto the houses of parliament, in the cinema and just about anywhere where people spend time.

What a lot of insiders seemed to love about the industry is that you get to combine creativity with business. So you could quite happily find yourself sat down looking at casting shots with a film director in the morning and discussing your client’s business strategy in the afternoon.

It’s a young industry with most people in their twenties or early thirties and this makes for a very fun working environment but the work is tough. Delivering large advertising campaigns is a painstaking process and as a service provider you are at your client’s mercy, so expect some long hours and weekend work. As most agencies are small businesses though (compared to their clients), they tend to be good at compensating hard work with days off.

Those looking for a career in advertising will probably want to consider the type of agency they’re interested in as they often cover different media. For example some agencies specialise in large brand campaigns which involve TV, Posters and mass media whilst others specialise in more one to one communications like direct mail. There are also digital advertising agencies and those that specialise in recruitment advertising.

Pay in advertising and the media in general is notoriously poor compared to some of the other professions such as banking, law and management consultancy. However it struck us that few people seemed to love their jobs as much as those in advertising. There aren’t many careers where a week on set with Marlene Class and Antonio Banderas is just part of the job.

At the large advertising agencies expect a starting salary of around £20-22,000. After 4 years you’ll be on about £40,000 and after 7 probably around £60,000. The senior management grade will be on approx £120,000 with the top CEOs up to £250,000. There are very few people in advertising that will earn in excess of £250,000 but one of the beauties of the industry is the ease with which you can set-up your own agency. The barrier to entry is low (all you need is a desk and computer) and it’s building (and exiting) from your own agency where the big money is found in this industry.

To find out more about graduate jobs in advertising, check out the videos below:

Graduate Jobs in Account Management

Graduate Jobs in Account Planning

Graduate Jobs in Media Planning

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Question list

1An insight into the Advertising Industry

An insight into the Advertising Industry

Dynamic, fun, unpredictable

My name is Tony Harris, I am Deputy chairman of RKCR/Y&R which is one of London’s top ten advertising agencies.

My name is Lucy Howard and I am an Account Planner

My name is Mark Tomblin and I am the Head of Strategy at a digital advertising agency called TBG London

My name is Paul Gardener, I am a Managing Partner for an advertising agency called McCann Erickson.

I am Dale Cursop and I am a WPP fellow.

I am Dan and this is Amber and we are a creative team.

Advertising is persuasion, it is not selling, that is the mistake that people make - that it is selling, you can sell all you want but selling doesn’t mean that people will buy. Persuading means that people might buy, or interact.

It’s about coming up with original and creative ways to convince someone that your product is better than anyone else’s.

You can create documentaries, you can create bottles of water, you can create park benches, you can create TV Ads.

Advertising is also used to educate people about things or make them aware of things so a lot of advertising is for charities for example, or for the Government to encourage people to do something or just to tell them about something.

It’s that lovely part where things that are creative come up against things that are business and we are having to harness that together the whole time and I don’t think there is another industry where you have to do that.

The clients would come to the account handler and potentially the planner to indicate that they need some advertising. The planner and the account handler would then work with the client to work out what the advert is trying to achieve and why. The planner will then craft that into a creative brief so they will have a proper think about what the ad is all about so that the creative team, the art director and the copywriter, aren’t just starting with a complete blank sheet of paper. The creative team will then develop the script or a scamp or an adcept, which will then be sold to the client by the account handler and potentially the planner. The ad will then go into production and will be made, shot, will be on air or posted and then the planner will evaluate the campaign so we will work out whether the advertising has achieved the aim set out for it.

I work in account management, which is a discipline or a department and is really a combination of project management and client relationship management. It sounds very formal but it isn’t really, it is really marshalling the resources of this agency to produce advertising campaigns for our clients.

What we do is likened to being a conductor, so we don’t play any instruments ourselves but we oversee the whole orchestra. So we are involved in every process of making an advert right from the very beginning, from discussing what the client wants to actually do, what they want to achieve from their advertising, through to actually getting a TV advert on air and on the TV.

So you meet all different kinds of people, you are sort of in charge of the advertising production so although you don’t have the ideas yourself, at least not by and large, it’s your responsibility to deliver the advertising and to keep the relationship with clients.

Account planning is about strategy, and the role of the planner is to represent the consumer in the advertising campaign and essentially to work out how the advertising can help a clients’ business. It’s a lot about the whys and wherefores of advertising. So what we are trying to do, what we are trying to say, who we are trying to say it to and why.

Basically what planners do is they actually try and understand a number of things, one is the market that the client is interested in, what your client offers in that market place and why it might appeal to people who are buying in that particular area.

Planning is about research, and I don’t mean wading through big reports, it’s about finding stuff out that can help make our advertising more insightful and better. So there will be a lot of internet based research or just getting out there and talking to consumers.

It is understanding that business problem and trying to turn it around and creating that thought or idea, or whatever you want to call it, that is given to creatives, who traditionally would execute that thought in individual adverts or individual campaigns.

They digest it and make it into a brief format and then basically there is a single proposition on a page and then we just have to answer in a creative way the message that the client wants to give. Then it can be TV, radio, press, online, stunts, ambient, viral, so it is just coming up with creative solutions to the problems

Above the line is really about a very overt communications so advertising on television, on cinema, on the radio, in print, where people expect to see advertising and it’s broadcast in some sense. Whereas below the line tends to be advertising things which is more targeted or finds you in a slightly more discreet way so that can be direct mail or it can be a piece of targeted email communication.

I think digital is the biggest thing to happen to advertising to media generally in my lifetime, I don’t just mean my working lifetime, my lifetime. It’s bigger than TV, it’s bigger than the printing press in many ways, because what it is doing is actually not just changing the way we communicate, it’s not just adding another channel, it is changing the way that people relate to each other and the way they do business.

Brands cannot escape from criticism any more, they can’t just push one message and actually do another thing - because they will get found out.

I think the advertising industry and the communications industry worldwide is going through a dramatic period of change and the change is broadly driven by developments in technology, the explosion of the media, the massive variety of what actually constitutes a brand experience nowadays and that is only going to keep going and developing and evolving.

You could buy a commercial 30 or 35 years ago and guarantee that 25 million people were watching. Now that is not the case, they might watch it later, they might view it on their mobile phone, there are all sorts of ways in which we have to talk to people and capture their imagination.

I love my working environment, it’s great, there are few places where you can go to work wearing a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and people will take you seriously.

One of the beauties of advertising is the variety of the job and it genuinely is something new and different every day.

Depending on the agency there will be bars in agencies, there will be games rooms, there will be areas that you can sit and chat with people, so agencies are trying to make it as comfortable as possible, partly in recognition that the work is quite hard actually.

There are other jobs that will financially pay better. I have quite a few friends that work in law, there is no doubt their jobs pay better. The point is they enjoy them nothing like the way I enjoy my job. There is no emotional pay off and that is the big thing, you have got to want to work in advertising.

It can be very, very pressured and you have deadlines to meet, there are very many industries that do, but in our instance if we do not get our act together there will be nothing to put up on that poster or there will be nothing to run on the TV. I think sometimes we can get a bit swept up in it all and there are a lot of very strong characters and it can get slightly over dramatic at times. We forget we are just selling stuff we are not saving people’s lives.

If you are not prepared to muck in and do anything you can to deliver the very best work and the very best thinking, that means late nights and it means weekends, then you really shouldn’t bother applying because you will hate it.

We want and are interested in people in all disciplines who are articulate, who are interesting and interested.

You have to be pretty switched on to what is going on in the world, not on the political side but on the social level, I think it is important to keep up with the news and to know what is ticking people’s boxes on a couple of big national levels, but then also know local trends and technological trends, what people are doing on the internet, what they will be doing in five years on the internet, for example.

I think you want to see someone who has got off their arse and done something interesting with their time. I think if you have gone out of your way to experience writing plays or you have done some charity work, anything like that where it shows you have used your initiative, that you have got some drive and some get up and go, it is incredibly important for advertising agencies.

If you are trying to get advertising agency work in a creative department, you tend to be employed on what you have done in the past, what creative work you have already done. So if you are just starting out then you are spending a lot of time showing creative directors what is known as your book, which is the work you have done off your own bat if you like, so advertising that you have dreamt up on behalf of phantom clients, either real ones or not.

You have to have a really good book, you have to have ten campaigns and they have to be stuff that you show to a creative director or a creative working in the industry and they would say “wow I wish I had done that”. It is really competitive now, really competitive.

You almost have to advertise yourself before you know how to advertise anything else so think about the thing that makes you different from the 2000 other bits of paper that are going to hit our desks, what is going to make us sit up and look at your application. One thing, and that will hold you in good stead.

Never underestimate the extent that you will have to love advertising, love communications and love culture and love ideas to work in advertising. The best people will eat, sleep, dream this stuff and they will generally look through things with that lens. They might go to the design museum and not think literally what of this can I use, but it will all be fed into how they churn and reuse things and reinterpret things for ads.

It’s building brands. Baby!

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